Old foes, new friends

April 23, 2005 — 10.00am

Though it happened 30 years ago, Nazmiye Iyidilli still recalls clearly the moment she was first made aware of the meaning of Anzac Day. She was working at an electrical products factory in Darlinghurst, her first job since arriving in Australia from Turkey, when she was approached by the foreman.

"He walked up to me and said, 'You know your grandad killed my grandad.' I looked at him, surprised, and said, 'What?' He said, 'Your grandad. He killed my grandad. At Gallipoli.' No, he was not joking. I could see he was very angry.

"I looked at him, and asked him what his grandfather was doing there, thousands of miles from his own country. I was very confused. I had seen Anzac mentioned in the history books, but I did not really know who these people were, or what this thing was.

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"When he explained, I said to him, 'I am so sorry about your grandad. But my grandad, he also was killed at this time."' Iyidilli, an English and Turkish language teacher, who lives in Auburn, smiles at the bittersweet memory of the conversation.

It is impossible to imagine such an uneasy exchange taking place anywhere in Australia today. Since 1975 Australians and Turks have forged a remarkable friendship, sufficiently strong to survive the row over earthworks at the site where so many thousands of lives were extinguished.

"It's a wonderful thing," says the historian Dr Kevin Fewster, who with Turkish migrants Vecihi and Hatice Hurmuz Basarin wrote the ground-breaking book Gallipoli: the Turkish Story. "And it's truly unique. Nowhere else to my knowledge have enemies embraced one another so warmly."

So close, so cordial has that friendship become that the two old foes now commemorate Anzac Day together, in schools, in clubs and remarkably, in official observances; marching together, drinking together, praying together, remembering fallen heroes together.

Among those marching in Sydney on Monday will be 20 or more members of the Turkish sub-branch of the NSW RSL. They will carry a large portrait of soldier-statesman Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose genius turned the Gallipoli campaign against the Allies, and a banner displaying his famous words of reconciliation.

Thirty years ago such shows of loyalty, not divided but shared, would have been unthinkable. The former Victorian RSL state president Bruce Ruxton once ruled out any rapprochement: "Anyone that was shooting us doesn't get in." Significantly, the Germans and the Japanese still don't get in.

So, how did the shooting over Gallipoli stop and the sharing begin? What now does Gallipoli mean to Australia's 150,000-strong Turkish community? And how will future generations remember?

As the former NSW RSL president Rusty Priest recalls, acts of kindness and humanity between Australians and Turks, who probably did not even recognise each other's national identity, even punctuated the fighting at Gallipoli. "On May 24, 1915, something remarkable happened ... an armistice was called to give both sides an opportunity to bury their dead. Bodies were lying everywhere. The stench must have been terrible. But they met, shared a cup of water and a cigarette, and no doubt discussed the futility of war," says Priest.

"I've always seen that as the place where the friendship started." By then, the two sides had developed mutual respect, recognising in the other a brave and tenacious enemy.

Over subsequent decades, the relationship slowly developed. In the 1950s, Turks fought with distinction alongside Diggers in Korea. In the late '60s, the first government-assisted Turkish migrants began arriving in Australia, where they discovered that Gallipoli had become part of their adopted country's mythology.

Though Turkish deaths during the campaign - at almost 90,000, 10 times as many as Australia's - meant that no member of the local community would have been unaffected, many newcomers were surprised by the significance of Gallipoli, of the Anzac legend to Australians.

Aytuner Akbas, president of the Turkish sub-branch of the state RSL, says, "Our history is long. We have been fighting wars for a thousand years. For us 'Gelibolu' was just one day. Why was it so important to remember this one day?"

As early as 1972 a small contingent of Turkish migrants took part in Sydney's Anzac Day march, bearing a hand-written banner proclaiming, "Turkish Australian friendship will never die." But as Fewster says, wider community interest in Gallipoli was waning. Things began to change about 20 years ago.

In 1985 Fewster and his collaborators produced a history of the campaign from the Ottoman perspective. "Less gung-ho, more holistic", it was an account to which Australians, accustomed to seeing themselves centre-stage, and local Turks, dismayed to find themselves cast as support actors, could both relate.

Five years later, on the 75th anniversary of Gallipoli, Bob Hawke became the first incumbent prime minister to visit Turkey. Since then the friendship has flourished, become formalised and even memorialised, notably at Ataturk Park in Canberra and in the magnificent Gallipoli Mosque at Auburn. Its very name is regarded by many in the Turkish community as a gift to the Australian people, a physical expression in Sydney suburbia of a shared legacy. Of shared values. Of shared prayers.

At the same time, the Gallipoli site in "a friendly country" - where, in Ataturk's words, the lost sons of Australia may rest in peace - has become a place of pilgrimage for tens of thousands of Australians, some of them Turkish. Basarin recorded the feelings of one such student. "I prayed for soldiers of both sides," he said. "Anzac soldiers lost the war but it was good to know that like the Turkish soldiers they fought heroically to represent their country."

Remarkably, their arrival in ever-increasing numbers has prompted renewed interest in Turkey in the campaign, rediscovery of forgotten stories, erection of new memorials on the peninsula, even the publication in Istanbul this month of the Fewster book, written originally to re-educate the Australian public.

Even the timing of the Anzac daybreaks on either side of the "bridge", as Basarin calls it, is felicitous. "I don't wish to sound crass," says Fewster. "But they seem 'made for TV' in Australia. By the time the morning activities - praying, marching, having a drink with mates - is over, the dawn service at Gallipoli is about to begin."

Nowhere is the special Gallipoli bond more strongly felt, more closely followed, than in the Turkish Australian community, which increasingly finds in the Gallipoli legend not just friendship but affirmation of an identity that necessarily remains part Turkish, part Australian.

Many of the stories Turkish families have to tell are profoundly personal. Akbas recalls sitting at a dinner table as a five-year-old child, hearing tales of how his grandfather and his fellow soldiers fought off starvation by eating flesh stripped from their own feet.

Iyidilli's husband, Asim, recounts how his grandfather was badly wounded and trapped overnight between the two lines of enemy trenches. Rescued, he was taken to hospital, where he woke to learn that he was one of only eight out of his 800-strong unit to have survived the attack.

Similarly, some of the observances differ from those of their Australian friends. As Akbas says, though attitudes are shifting, in favour of Gallipoli, many Turks still attach greater significance to the great sea victory of Canakkale, commemorated on March 18.

Fewster attended this year's function, held at the Auburn Bowling Club. "It was an extraordinary, quintessentially multicultural scene. An Australian flag flying at one end of the rinks, a Turkish flag at the other. But everyone mixing happily together."

Sharing experiences. Sitting down and talking to one another.

And that is what Gallipoli is really about, says Akbas. "I think it was all a matter of time: of people, not politicians, but ordinary people like you and me, Australian and Turkish coming together again, sitting down and talking ... from here," he says, thumping his heart. "Then we begin to understand one another. My people were killed, your people were killed, but now we can go forward together in peace."

The legacy is in safe hands: Akbas's six-year-old grandson, Tristyn, can already tell his classmates about the deeds of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

No one denies that hairline faults still exist in the friendship. It pains Akbas to read in an encyclopedia - one he once used to sell for a living - a definition of a Turk as a "cruel, brutal, tyrannical or unruly man". More topically, Turks are rightfully sensitive to accusations that the Gallipoli site has been mismanaged.

But community leaders on both sides say that memories of that awful war unite the old foes and will always be stronger than any day-to-day niggles that might divide them.

Priest recalls how, several years ago while walking at Anzac Cove, he conceived the idea of collecting sand from the beach and placing it beneath the boot of the archetypal digger, whose statue was being erected on Anzac Bridge. "The idea was that the digger would forever be standing with his mates at Gallipoli."

And so it came to pass. On the big day, as the statue was being lowered into place by crane, Priest reached up and placed the sand in a cavity beneath the digger's left boot. He noticed that the crane driver was crying. "He had a bit of a tear in his eye. He was getting very emotional. Turned out he was Australian-born but his people came from Turkey."

Priest's response was, perhaps, typically Australian: "I told him if he dropped that bloody statue he'd have more than a tear in his eye."